Valerie Anita Aurora is an American software engineer and someone who works to promote equality for women. She co-founded the Ada Initiative, a group that tried to increase the number of women involved in free culture, open-source technology, and open-source communities. Aurora is also known in the Linux community for supporting the development of new file systems, such as ChunkFS and the Union file system. Her birth name was Val Henson, but she changed it before 2009, choosing her middle name in honor of the computer scientist Anita Borg. In 2012, Aurora and Mary Gardiner, another co-founder of the Ada Initiative, were named two of the most influential people in computer security by SC Magazine. In 2013, she received the O'Reilly Open Source Award.
Early life and education
Aurora, the daughter of Carolyn Meinel, grew up in New Mexico and was home-schooled. She began learning about computer programming after attending DEF CON in 1995. She later studied computer science and mathematics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
Programming
In 2002, she began working with ZFS at Sun Microsystems, where she first worked with file systems. Later, she joined IBM and worked with Theodore Ts'o's group, where they studied ways to improve the ext2 and ext3 Linux file systems. At Intel, she helped develop the ext2 dirty bit and relative atime features. Along with Arjan van de Ven, she created ChunkFS, a system that makes file system checks easier by splitting the file system into separate parts. She also helped organize the first Linux File Systems Workshop to increase awareness of file system development and find funding for it. As of 2009, she worked for Red Hat as a file systems developer, as well as a part-time science writer and Linux consultant.
Ada Initiative
She was already an activist for women in open source when she joined Mary Gardiner and members of the Geek Feminism blog to create anti-harassment policies for conferences after Noirin Shirley was sexually assaulted at ApacheCon 2010. With Gardiner, she started the Ada Initiative in February 2011. The organization was named after Ada Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage and is considered the world's first computer programmer. In 2013, she helped found Double Union, a hackerspace for women, with Amelia Greenhall and Liz Henry. The Ada Initiative closed in October 2015.
Writing
Aurora has kept a blog since 2007, writing about coding and the experiences of women in open source projects. She has described events at DEF CON and the harassment that happened there. In 2013, Aurora gave a comment to The Verge about the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s role in defending Andrew Auernheimer, a man who was in prison for hacking and had previously harassed Kathy Sierra. Aurora said, "This is another case where they are saying, 'The cases we care about are the ones white men are interested in. We’re less interested in protecting women on the web.'" This comment was criticized by Jillian York, the Director of International Freedom of Expression at the EFF.
In 2013, Aurora also commented on the Donglegate controversy, which involved a woman at a mostly male PyCon event who faced backlash after reporting a conversation she overheard between two men. Aurora criticized the threats sent to the woman and said that the group Anonymous, which used many computers to spread messages, was "changing how people feel about the situation." When asked if firing one of the men involved was a good response, she said, "I don’t have enough information to know that." Two years later, Aurora praised the balance of men and women at PyCon and called Guido van Rossum and the Python community "the biggest success story for women in open source." In the same interview, she approved of the culture on the website Tumblr and said that Patricia Torvalds, the daughter of Linus Torvalds, was a positive example for others.